No Country for Old Men — 4K
The Coen brothers’ modern classic adapts Cormac McCarthy’s book about drug violence on the border. Welcome to supply & demand economics at its most basic: human values are absent in a bloody scramble for a cache of drug money. Tommy Lee Jones is the old lawman with a defeatist outlook and Josh Brolin is a daring Texan who gets more danger than he bargains for. Javier Bardem won the prize for the most original movie villain since Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter. The violent thrills subvert audience expectations — and remain true to McCarthy’s nihilistic vision.
No Country for Old Men 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1243
2007 / Color / 2:39 widescreen / 122 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date December 10, 2024 / 49.95
Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson, Kelly Macdonald, Garret Dillahunt, Tess Harper.
Cinematography: Roger Deakins
Production Designer: Jess Gonchor
Art Director: John P. Goldsmith
Film Editor: Roderick Jaynes (the Coens)
Costume Design: Mary Zophres
Original Music: Carter Burwell
Screenplay Written by Ethan Coen, Joel Coen from a novel by Cormac McCarthy
Executive producers Robert Graf, Mark Roybal
Produced by Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Scott Rudin
Directed by Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Author Cormac McCarthy died in 2023, hailed by many as the greatest American author of his time, including novelist Stephen King. We’ve seen the 2009 film version of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic tale The Road and have read his 1985 Blood Meridian, described by some as ‘the great American novel.’ McCarthy’s pessimism is compelling; Blood Meridian sees American civilization as an unceasing slaughter that stops only when the land ends at the Pacific Ocean. The 2005 Cormac McCarthy novel No Country for Old Men is about drug crime killings in Texas. An apocalypse of sorts is already with us, with drug violence destroying what’s left of human decency.
Some critics think that Joel and Ethan Coen’s film adaptation of No Country for Old Men 4K improves on the novel. It became 2007’s big Oscar winner, earning five Academy nominations and taking home awards for Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay and Supporting Actor. The Coens translate McCarthy’s spare prose into a tense account of a cat & mouse pursuit across Texas. An old lawman follows the trail of corpses left in the outlaws’ wake, knowing that conventional police methods are useless. No Country is a despairing State of the Union message about The War On Drugs … and this is how things were in 1980.
Trailer-dwelling welder Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is hunting antelope in open country when he stumbles upon the aftermath of a bloody drug shoot-out, and recoups a satchel holding $2 million in cash. Hours later, he returns to the scene of the crime and is spotted by more smugglers. He shakes them off his trail but is unable to do the same with the frightening Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a killer hired by mobsters on the American side. Chigurh is so unpredictable that his own clients dispatch a second ‘problem solver’ behind his back, Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson). Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) tries to comfort Moss’s worried wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald, In the Electric Mist) but has no answers to explain this new era of ultra-violent crime. He promises Carla Jean that he’ll bring her husband back safe, but cannot anticipate what will happen next.
No Country for Old Men reinvigorates some familiar character types — the luckless local boy in trouble over his head, the wise sheriff who’s seen it all and the implacable, unstoppable psycho killer. Most of the oddball dialogue is too creepy to be funny. The laughs are the uneasy kind, as the remarks of Ed Tom Bell’s dippy deputy don’t add up to Fargo– grade humor: “Gee, our perpetrator was right here!”
Llewelyn Moss is a workaday everyman who grabs a chance at a fortune. We sympathize and identify with both him and his sweetheart of a wife; they’re infinitely more deserving than Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw in The Getaway. But Moss makes one bonehead mistake right off the top. Cormac McCarthy’s West Texas landscape is too unforgiving to let him off the hook, and he spends the rest of the film struggling against losing odds. It’s a cruel world, when giving a dying man a drink of water can seal one’s fate. Why bother to formulate a foolproof escape plan, when a killer can get your address just by helping an old lady with her luggage?
Don Siegel may have launched the modern tale of hit men with bizarre working methods: Eli Wallach in his The Lineup and Lee Marvin in his The Killers are harbingers of Business As Usual in a postmodern, post-moral world. Anton Chigurh tops them both. An unnaturally calm killer with an ugly haircut and a weird, intimidating way of doing business, he has no qualms about killing anyone or anything, sometimes with an unusual killing device. Sometimes he taunts potential victims with cruel games of chance, as if to show that he’s only following some natural law of slaughter. An inoffensive gas station clerk (Gene Jones) never knows how lucky he is.
Anton Chigurh’s bloody wake is littered with bodies but few traceable clues. His firearm of choice appears to be some kind of silenced shotgun. The staging of the shootouts is superb. The absence of witnesses for running gun battles in hotels and on the street may be realistic — if we heard gunshots outside our door, our first reaction would not be to rush out and take a look. Chigurh’s habit of leaving no witnesses alive eventually becomes an anti-joke: whenever the camera cuts away from an encounter with a bellboy or desk clerk, we assume that they’re history.
Moss’s clever efforts to evade the killer work brilliantly … for a while. As it’s only 1980, poor Llewelyn Moss doesn’t suspect that the container with the loot is rigged with a location transponder, so Chigurh’s initial efforts are easy.
The movie doesn’t shy away from Cormac McCarthy’s graphic descriptions of gunshot wounds. Both men are forced to improvise traumatic patch-ups on themselves, digging out shot pellets from shoulders and knees. Llewelyn was a veteran; perhaps he had contact with combat medicine. Chigurh can give himself local anesthesia, unlike a striking precedent in a classic film noir, He Walked by Night. In a self-surgery scene in that 1948 movie, Richard Basehart’s wounded thief Roy Martin almost faints as he removes a bullet from his own shoulder, with nothing more than hot water and forceps.
Anton Chigurh does meet his match in one scene, in a way. His effort to trace his prey is blocked by a trailer park manager who flat-out refuses to divulge where Llewelyn Moss works. (Kathy Lamkin, also in The Valley of Elah). His intimidating manner has no effect: the stubborn woman simply fires back, “Did you not hear me?” with the unmovable determination she probably brings to NRA meetings. Chigurh sees no fear in her eyes. The lady has definitely messed with his screwy personal code.
So when will the experienced old sheriff get a chance to bring justice back to Terrell County? Tommy Lee Jones’ Ed Tom Bell spends the entire picture arriving too late at crime scenes. Finding a killing field where ten or twelve corpses (and a dog or two) are spread out in the dirt, Ed assesses it like something that happened years ago. What occurred is obvious, yet it leaves Ed with no cards to play. The bodies will all prove to be anonymous Norteño gunslingers. Tracing the guns and vehicles will lead to dead ends. The cops will forever be three steps behind the action.
Ed is a good man. He cares deeply about people like Moss and Carla Jean, and does what he can for them. He’s more sensible than some of his older, retired buddies. One ex-lawman theorizes that the drug mayhem is a symptom of disrespectful youth. The tragedy is that he sorely underestimates himself. He detects the nature of the killer’s ‘mystery murder weapon,’ but doesn’t bother to add up the clues. He instead shares his quiet despair with a sympathetic girlfriend, Loretta (Tess Harper).
No Country for Old Men has a clear eye for landscapes and a fresh way of staging action. Complicated physical effects and stunts are done in one take, like an explosion that Chigurh rigs outside a pharmacy. Joel and Ethan Coen spend half a reel toying with an involved Alfred Hitchcock-like bit of business involving hiding a satchel in a heating duct. Moss does everything right, not that it does him a bit of good. He already made his fatal mistake, trying to play the Good Samaritan.
Only once or twice are Moss and Chigurh in close proximity to each other. When injured, each experiences a curious parallel situation of having to bargain with passing young men. Soaked with blood, Moss interacts with some guys on a pedestrian bridge to Mexico. In the aftermath of a hairy car crash, Chigurh must negotiate with two boys on bicycles: “Hey mister, your bone’s sticking out of your arm.” In both cases, we note that the first thing on the mind of ordinary males that encounter an injured stranger … is personal profit.
At a key juncture the Coens throw a narrative shakeup into the works that left more than a few audiences feeling confused, disoriented. We suspect that Llewelyn Moss is asking for trouble when he talks to a woman at his latest hideout, an El Paso motel. An inviting blonde drinking by the swimming pool? This isn’t escapist fun-time, like Robert Mitchum chatting up Jane Russell in His Kind of Woman. The camera stays wide on the poolside woman … Moss stays at arm’s length as well. It’s as if the camera were already backing off from something it knows is going to happen, and doesn’t want to see. Moss’s reverse shot is even given a fade-out. Qué será, será.
The very next scene threw many audiences for a loop, confusing viewers who happen to blink at the wrong time. The scene’s impact was such that it ended up being reflected in the pages of The New Yorker, in a bit of sidebar fiction by Nora Ephron. A married couple who return from a screening of No Country discover that they had completely different impressions of what they’d just seen: No, But We Saw the Movie. (Caution, spoilers).
The reveal of a key death goes by in such a blur that some viewers don’t realize what happened. * Life can certainly be like that. The Coens’ No Country for Old Men delivers a jolt that expresses the nature of real-life violence. Lives end abruptly, leaving survivors and onlookers to guess what exactly happened.
No dramatic balance is possible in struggles with few direct confrontations and no defining showdowns. Hardly anybody in the picture, from Grandma to Moss to the kid on the bicycle, thinks very far beyond their personal economic situation. Those that act on humane principles feel defeated from the get-go. The Law as Ed knew it is no longer. His generation of lawmen, like entire generations of principled Americans, have given up on everything. Is this the story of our country?
The Criterion Collection’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of No Country for Old Men is a new remaster job approved by cinematographer Roger Deakins. On a good-sized monitor, the UHD improvements really stand out, especially in the film’s many scenes out in the desert. Traditional camerawork once resorted to fill light by day and day-for-night tricks by night. Deakins’ images distinguish between several kinds of ‘night.’ Our experience with American deserts is that ‘just pre-dawn’ has a completely different feel than ‘just post-sunset.’ Subtle image changes add greatly to the atmosphere, separating the pitch-black of night from the pre-dawn transition, when Llewelyn Moss makes his escape downriver.
Niether does Deakins try to prettify the Texas high noon. The backgrounds lose detail in the glare, just as with human eyesight. We understand that digital effects were utilized to achieve these distinctions. Digital manipulation also surely had a hand in the lightning storms we sometimes see on the horizon.
As with most Criterion 4K product, the video extras are on the Blu-ray disc only. They include new interviews with the Coens & Deakins, plus some of the interview and making-of items that appeared on older Buena Vista discs. Tommy Lee Jones was never thrilled to talk for movie publicity, but he seems very pleased with this picture. Jones has said that the character of Ed Tom Bell was so different, he didn’t mind playing another ‘western sheriff’ role.
Spaniard Javier Bardem won the Best Supporting Oscar for this show, and is cooperative as well. We appreciate Kelly Macdonald’s West Texas drawl even more after hearing her speak in her natural Scottish accent.
Even at this late date I hear from viewers that are down on Ethan and Joel Coen. Some read the filmmaking brothers as cynics, making fun of regional accents and characterizing rural Americans as hicks and morons. We always thought the Coens were very sympathetic to their characters. They know this part of the country very well, and communicate its nature in practically every shot.
The behind-the-scenes material provides an appreciation of the skilled work that goes into the scenes of action and violence. Complicated makeup effects allow Chigurh to look as if he’s really garotting a deputy with his handcuff chain. The dozen corpses in the shootout aftermath are revealed to be highly detailed manikins, something I never would have guessed.
We see wounded animals amid the random carnage, an antelope and a dog. A second dog is dead, also represented by a manikin. I mention this for readers that will watch faked shots of people being chopped to bits, but cannot abide the idea of harm coming to an animal, even when also simulated.
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
No Country for Old Men 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
New conversation between filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen and author Megan Abbott
New conversation between Deakins and associate producer David Diliberto, also featuring Abbott
Archival interviews with actors Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, and Kelly Macdonald
Behind-the-scenes documentary by Josh Brolin
Three making-of documentaries featuring on-set footage and interviews with cast and crew members
Insert pamphlet with and essay by Francine Prose, plus a 2007 piece on the film by author Larry McMurtry.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD disc an one Blu-ray in a keep case with an insert pamphlet
Reviewed: December 18, 2024
(7246coun)
* I’m now convinced that it’s not the Coens’ fault that I mis-read the movie in the theater. They give us two cutaways to the dead man on the floor, wearing a distinctive cowboy shirt. Had I any sense for costuming, I should have known who it was. But more viewers than just myself and Nora Ephron became confused. Instead of faulting No Country we think the Coens deserve special praise for not dumbing-down their show.
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Text © Copyright 2024 Glenn Erickson
Did they Coens do any tinkering /re-editing with this like they did with Miller’s Crossing?
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